Few days ago NVIDIA announced new DLDSR feature or Deep Learning Dynamic Super Resolution. And I was waiting in excitement to try it out today with new driver they released for it. Just to be confused. A lot.
This is what NVIDIA was promising…
Basically no framerate change despite actually running at higher resolution. Cool, right? Well, not quite… Examples below are just main menu of DX:MD running on RTX 3080. Framerate captured with ReShade, was the same when done with feature on my monitor instead of ReShade, but I can’t screenshot that.
Spot the freaking problem? Old brute DSR that just renders at higher resolution and downscales to native monitor resolution is faster by a tiny bit than “2x more efficient” DLDSR.
What the hell NVIDIA? Sure, I’m not using 1080p but 1440p instead, but still, there is literally no difference in performance between old DSR and new DLDSR. Not only that, they both perform SIGNIFICANTLY worse than native 1440p. I mean like it literally halves the framerate. What’s up with that? Or is Prey some game that just happens to scale so bizarrely well with DLDSR, but Deus Ex:Mankind Divided that I just happen to play right now somehow doesn’t at all?
And to make matters worse, new DLDSR is plagued by same stupid refresh rate issues original “legacy” DSR had and I experience them back on GTX 980. Freaking Maxwell 2 card. Fast forward to 2022 with RTX 3080 and the same nonsense is still present. What I’m talking about is refresh rate being stuck at 60Hz if game doesn’t support adjustment of refresh rate within the game. DX:MD does, but most games don’t. Stupid DSR/DLDSR function just assumes you can only run 4K at 60Hz and will run at that even though the physical monitor is actually 144Hz. WHY?! But if the game supports framerate adjustment, you can set it to 144Hz and it’ll happily run at 4K 144Hz. WHY?!? WHY NVIDIA!? Use the freaking refresh rate of the physical display automatically. You’re scaling it virtually, there is no refresh rate limitation there. Playing at 60Hz on 144Hz monitor is literally painful to watch.
It’s also weird DSR/DLDSR resolutions are screenshotted at 4K as you can see from examples above. Which is also weird. I thought DSR’s downscaling is done with the driver before being actually sent to the physical display output so that it can apply smoothing filter. But from the looks of it it just sends 4K image to the actual physical output. Monitor displays at 1440p because it’s what it is and can’t do 4K, but if I screenshot it, it’s 2160p (4K) because that’s the rendered resolution. Woot? This makes me believe the DSR smoothing slider literally does nothing at default 33% if it doesn’t actually scale anything and monitor does that instead. This doesn’t make any sense, but explains why framerate drops the same with DSR and DLDSR. It’s rendering over 2x as much pixels as native. And framerate is halved as a result.
Either this is just straight up broken or I’m missing something. I know how to use DSR and this doesn’t make any sense.
Oh and as side note, Marty McFly’s effects are nowhere to be found when i tried enabling them with NVIDIA Experience in DX:MD. They just weren’t there. Back to ReShade it is. What an underwhelming and disappointing “feature” driver update…
Angry Sheep Blog 
Nvidia always makes things confusing but It think both new DLDSR options (1.78x and 2,25x) competes and thus should be compared (quality visuals and performance) to normal DSR 4x. Think of it as a DLSS Quality (2.25x) and Balanced (1.78x) for DSR 4x
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I’m trying to figure this out (again, half a year later) and I don’t think that should be the case. They claim native and new DLDSR should have nearly the same framerate. Yet mine is basically half. Something’s weird here.
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